Date: Tue, 10 Dec 1996 03:35:54 GMT
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<TITLE>Cecil paper: "Whole-Program Optimization of Object-Oriented Languages"</title>
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<H1>Whole-Program Optimization of Object-Oriented Languages</H1>
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<!WA0><!WA0><!WA0><!WA0><a href="http://www.cs.washington.edu/people/faculty/chambers.html">
Craig Chambers</a>, 
<!WA1><!WA1><!WA1><!WA1><a href="http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/jdean">
Jeffrey Dean</a>, and
<!WA2><!WA2><!WA2><!WA2><a href="http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/grove">
David Grove</a> 
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We describe Vortex, an optimizing compiler intended to produce
high-quality code for programs written in a heavily-object-oriented
style.  To achieve this end, Vortex includes a number of intra- and
interprocedural static analyses that can exploit knowledge about the
whole program being compiled, including intraprocedural class
analysis, class hierarchy analysis, and exhaustive class testing, and
profile-guided optimizations such as receiver class prediction and
selective specialization.  To make whole-program optimization
practical, Vortex automatically tracks cross-file optimization
dependencies at a fine granularity, triggering selective
recompilation of affected compiled files whenever the source
program changes.  Empirical measurements of five purely
object-oriented benchmark programs written in Cecil, ranging in size
from several hundred to 75,000 lines of source code, indicate that
these optimization techniques improve performance of large programs
by more than a factor of three over a system with only intraprocedural
static optimizations.  Vortex is written in Cecil, and it has been
used as its own compiler and optimizer during its development for the
past two years.  Vortex's optimizations and implementation
techniques should be useful for any language or program where
optimizations to reduce the cost of polymorphism are important,
including object-oriented languages (we are currently adding
front-ends for C++, Modula-3, and Java to Vortex to study its effectiveness
on these other language styles) and other high-level
symbolic, functional, and logic languages.
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<EM>Note:  This document is 70 pages long.</EM>
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<i>
University of Washington Department of Computer Science and Engineering Technical Report UW-CSE-96-06-02. </i>
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To get the PostScript file, click
<!WA3><!WA3><!WA3><!WA3><a href="ftp://cs.washington.edu/homes/chambers/whole-program.ps.gz">here</a>.
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